For the past few years, innovation has accelerated the development of new materials. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this cycle of innovation. The deep tech startup has raised €3.7 million (about $4 million at the current exchange rate).
If you are interested in the development of new materials, you may have noticed that several teams have shared important breakthroughs with the research community when it comes to material prediction.
“Historically, over the last 50 years, R&D to discover new materials has progressed very quickly,” Altrove co-founder and CEO Thibaud Martin told TechCrunch. There are some bottlenecks. And the important thing is already the starting point – how can you predict that materials made of several elements can theoretically exist?
When you combine two different chemical elements, there are tens of thousands of possibilities. When you want to work with three different elements, there are tens of thousands of combinations. With four elements, you get millions of possibilities.
Teams working for DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta or Orbital Materials have developed artificial intelligence models to overcome computational constraints and predict new materials that can exist in a stable state. “More stable material has been predicted in the last nine months than in the last 49 years,” Martin said.
But solving this bottleneck is only one part of the equation. Knowing that new materials can exist is not enough when creating new materials. You must come with a recipe.
“The recipe is not only about what you combine. It is also about the proportions, at what temperature, in what order, for how long. So there are many factors, many variables involved in how to create new ingredients,” said Martin.
Altrove focuses on inorganic materials and starts with more specific rare earth elements. There is a market opportunity here with rare earth elements because they are hard to source, prices vary greatly and they often come from China. Many companies are trying to rely less on China as part of their supply chain to avoid regulatory uncertainty.
Create an automatic repeating loop
The company does not create new materials from scratch but selects interesting candidates from all the new materials that have been predicted. Altrove then uses its own AI models to generate potential recipes for these ingredients.
Currently, the company tests these recipes one by one and produces small samples of each material. After that, Altrove has developed a proprietary characterization technology that uses an X-ray diffractometer to find out if the output material performs as expected.
“Sounds are not that important but it’s actually very complicated to check what you’ve created and understand why. In most cases, what you’re doing is not what you’re looking for in the first place,” said Martin.
This is where Altrove shines as the company’s co-founder and CTO Joonathan Laulainen has a PhD in material science and is an expert in characterization. Startups have IPs associated with characterization.
Learning from the characterization step to improve your recipe is key when creating new ingredients. That’s why Altrove wanted to automate the lab to test more recipes at the same time and speed up feedback.
“We want to build the first high-throughput methodology. In other words, pure prediction only takes you 30% of the way to having material that can really be used by industry. The other 70% consists of iterations in real life. That’s why it’s so important to have an automated lab because you add throughput and you can create more parallel experiments,” said Martin.
Altrove is establishing itself as an AI company with hardware. They think they will sell licenses for newly produced materials or create the materials themselves with third-party partners. The company raised €3.7 million in a round led by Contrarian Ventures with Emblem also participating. Some business angels also invested in the startup, such as Thomas Clozel (CEO of Owkin), Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face CTO) and Nikolaj Deichmann (founder of 3Shape).
The startup takes inspiration from biotech companies that have turned to AI to discover new drugs and treatments – but this time for new ingredients. Altrove plans to build an automated laboratory by the end of the year and sell its first asset within 18 months.
